Editing KiCad Boards on an iPad Without Re-Serializing Them

PCB Canvas is professional board design built for the iPad. You place real parts, route real boards, verify your work against live design rules, and send the result to fabrication, all with touch and Apple Pencil instead of fighting desktop CAD. It is for hardware people who want the board itself to be the workspace, where selection, placement, and routing happen directly on the canvas rather than in dialogs about the canvas. It is currently in a private TestFlight beta with a waitlist.

KiCad in, KiCad out, nothing lost

The promise that makes this usable in a real workflow is "KiCad in, KiCad out, no lock-in," and the way that promise is kept is the part I find most interesting. When you open a KiCad file and edit it, PCB Canvas does not parse the whole thing into its own model and re-serialize it back out on save. It byte-patches the original file in place. Re-serialization is where subtle data loss creeps in, fields you did not know about getting dropped or reordered, so the tool simply refuses to do it. The board also runs on an integer-nanometre geometry kernel, so coordinates are exact integers rather than accumulating floating-point drift.

To prove the exports are honest, they are raster-compared against KiCad's own plotter output. On five torture boards the result was zero unmatched copper. That is the kind of check you want backing a claim of compatibility, because it measures the actual pixels rather than trusting that two tools agree.

Routing that refines instead of refusing

The interaction model is built around not fighting the router. You tap intent points with the Pencil and it refines the trace toward them rather than rejecting a path it does not like. Tap back to undo a bad leg. Move a part and the traces clean themselves up, reconnecting into a result that looks intentional. Selection is copper-first, so a trace crossing a part body wins the tap and the whole net lights up. When you need to be exact, you type a coordinate in mm or mils and snap to a real grid.

An open-hardware nRF52840 board, opened straight from its KiCad file, is what the site shows routing live. If you do board work and have wanted this on a tablet, join the beta from the live site.